Verified Federal Data · No Paid Rankings
Best Colleges for Engineering
Top engineering programs ranked by graduate earnings, completion rates, and actual cost. Federal data. No paid rankings.
How We Rank Engineering Schools
These rankings filter to schools with engineering programs, then rank by our 5-component composite score using verified federal data. Rankings use a composite score: graduate earnings (28%), graduation rate (25%), social mobility via Pell Grant share (20%), debt burden (15%), and net cost for low-income students (12%). Where a school has not reported one of these, that component is dropped and the remaining weights are rescaled rather than filled in with an estimate. Only 4-year non-profit schools with sufficient data qualify.
- →Earnings: Median annual earnings 10 years after enrollment. Source: College Scorecard.
- →Graduation rate: Full-time first-time students completing within 150% of normal time. Source: IPEDS.
- →Net price: Average annual cost after all grants and scholarships. Source: IPEDS.
- →Social mobility: Share of students receiving Pell Grants, a direct measure of access for low-income students. Source: IPEDS.
- →Debt burden: Median federal loan debt at graduation. Source: College Scorecard.
Top 10 Engineering Schools (2026)
Ranked by composite: earnings, graduation rate, social mobility, debt, affordability.
| # | School | Earnings (10yr) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, MA | $143,372 |
| 2 | Stanford University Stanford, CA | $124,080 |
| 3 | CUNY Bernard M Baruch College New York, NY | $75,971 |
| 4 | Princeton University Princeton, NJ | $110,066 |
| 5 | California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA | $128,566 |
| 6 | University of California-Berkeley Berkeley, CA | $92,446 |
| 7 | University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA | $111,371 |
| 8 | University of California-Irvine Irvine, CA | $80,735 |
| 9 | Brown University Providence, RI | $93,487 |
| 10 | Cornell University Ithaca, NY | $104,043 |
460 schools with Engineering programs in dataset. Top 10 shown. Data: IPEDS + College Scorecard. Updated annually.
All 460 Colleges in the Dataset
The ranking above shows the top 10 by composite score. Every school in the full dataset is listed here so you can explore beyond the top results.
Interested in other majors?
We rank top colleges for every major using the same federal data.
Browse All Majors →Find Your Perfect Engineering School
These 10 schools are a start. Search all colleges with engineering programs, filter by state, cost, size, and more.
Search Engineering Schools →